When Planet was created, its founders set out to employ space capabilities for improving life on Earth, at costs far less than traditional satellites. Now its relevance to military planning means its capability is being used by US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) and NATO, and has direct relevance to Australia’s geostrategic environment and national security.
Planet revolutionised the Earth observation industry with the highest frequency satellite imagery data commercially available, transforming the way governments and companies deliver insights at the daily pace of change, the company says on its website. Since formation, Planet has launched some 600 satellites, with hundreds of operational satellites across low earth orbit.
First generation satellites were called Doves and were in the 3U cubesat form, that is box 30 x 10 x 10 centimetres. The first Dove emerged from a California garage. Doves are now in their third generation called SuperDoves and continue to deliver Planet’s PlanetScope constellation capability for daily imaging, delivering resolution of 3–5 metres.
“Part of the value of these systems is the fact that no one is tasking them. You don’t have to know where to look or work through a standard collection tasking or orchestration process,” Brock Edwards said.
“That’s the value of the comprehensiveness of our daily, global scan. We have an image of every spot in Australia today. We have an image of every spot in Australia yesterday. We have an image of every spot on the globe basically every day basically for the last nine years, producing an untapped nine-year archive of information.
“When you pair that archive with AI and ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning) and start extracting insights from all of that data you begin to understand changes and patterns of life over time, which you can leverage to inform decisions and provide insights and alerts to subtle changes and deviations in behaviour that may not otherwise be recognised.”
Planet also operates other satellites with other capabilities, including approximately 15 taskable satellites in low earth orbit, which supports intraday revisit and are able to be directed to image areas of special interest. This capability helps customers capture data when and where they need it.
Taskable SkySat® satellites deliver image resolution of 50 centimetres. Their upcoming replacements, the new Pelican™ satellites are designed to deliver 50 centimetres class resolution, with the goal of moving to 30 centimetres with their next generation. The new Tanager™ hyperspectral constellation will map carbon emissions, especially methane.
This diversity of capabilities and constant updating of technology has given Planet vast expertise at Earth observation and analysis, making it one of the major global commercial satellite companies. Planet is a global leader in Earth imaging due to the fact that it owns and operates the world’s largest commercial fleet that has enabled its unique capability to provide high-frequency, high-resolution daily imagery.
Planet’s imagery and analysis capabilities are exceptionally useful for civil and commercial applications, including monitoring of land use such as agriculture, disaster management, impacts of climate change, wildlife movements and commercial activities.
Want to know precisely how many shipping containers are moved through a particular port over a particular period? That’s easily determined. How about coastal erosion over time? Same.
Edwards said no other commercial space observation company was able to provide the daily broad area imagery collection of Planet but what was unique was its archive.
“If you have nine years of data of an area of interest, you can really understand normal behaviour so that when something changes, you can notice it very quickly,” he said.
Farrow said Planet had a strong civil government and commercial industry customer base in Australia.
Robert Cardillo, Planet’s chief strategist and chairman of the board of Planet Federal said Planet’s value proposition, its ability to image vast areas and analyse that data to provide useful insights, is perfectly suited to supporting Australian national security.
“I cannot think of a more appropriate country for the value proposition that Planet offers,” he said.
Cardillo is a former director of the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (2014–19), former deputy director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency and a regular visitor to Australia. In Canberra, he attended meetings of the Five-Eyes intelligence community (the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), developing a very positive view of Australia’s can-do approach.
Other countries would want to take more time to study a particular proposal or question available budgets to support it. “The Aussie at the table would say ‘let’s give it a go’ every time,” he said.
Both the US INDOPACOM and NATO leveraged Planet’s services, only months after hearing Planet’s pitch. These programs aim to monitor activity in their respective regions to support peace and security.
Edwards said daily scans and algorithms helped assess what could be indicative of a future threat; logistics decisions precede military decisions, as what occurred ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Before the tanks or planes or ships roll across the border, things have to happen to enable that activity,” he said. “There is going to be pre-positioning of things which will happen way before those planes take off.
“That’s fuel and supplies and medical preparedness. There are a lot of indicators that would happen way before the tanks cross the border that you can monitor for.
“You want to go further back than that? Who’s enabling that port activity? Who’s feeding the supplies?”
For Australia, the vast landmass, extensive ocean areas of interest and mostly good weather conditions were well suited to Planet capabilities.
“You are surrounded by water, you have a lot of important natural resources that need to be protected. How do you do that over such large areas?” Cardillo asked. “There’s unfortunately human trafficking and illegal immigration, trafficking in drugs, narcotics, guns.
“The daily constellation, the unblinking eye that now has years of the history of Australia in our archive, it’s perfectly suited now that we have the algorithmic and compute capability to turn that potential value into tangible answers to questions.
“The Planet value proposition, more than just our satellites, is perfectly suited to what I believe the Australians demand.”
Cardillo said in some ways, Planet is answering questions Australia had not even asked. “The Planet approach to remote sensing is quite different to everyone else’s,” he said.
“Planet from its very origin decided to take on the challenge of attempting to image the whole Earth once a day. They called that Mission One. It was accomplished eight years ago. No one had anything like it before and no one has done it since.”
Cardillo said Planet’s imaging capabilities weren’t about the images themselves.
“It’s about the sequence of images and the archive of images and the images over long periods of time, where you can use a very high-powered compute that we are all now benefitting from,” he said.
“Equally as important are the high-powered algorithms that are running on that compute in order to extract useful information for human consumption, human decision making and expert analysis.
“We should let the system and the machines answer three questions – what, where and when – and save your human experts and leaders to wrestle with why and what’s next.”
Interested to learn how the Planet satellite insights combined with AI can enhance maritime domain awareness in Australia? Watch their on-demand webinar, “AI-Enhanced Maritime Domain Awareness for Asia-Pacific Defence” during the 2025 Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition in Sydney, Australia.
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